Newsweek
By Pema Levy
November 19, 2014
President
Obama’s long-awaited executive actions to transform the immigration
system are around the corner—and politicians and activists on both sides
of the hotly contested issue are waiting
to see what he has in store.
In
the absence of action from the House of Representatives on bipartisan
immigration measures, Obama has promised to use his executive authority
by the end of the year to ease deportations
on some of the estimated 11.7 million undocumented immigrants in the
United States.
The
president said in an annoucement on his Facebook page that he would
make a statement to the American people at 8:00 pm ET on Thursday. There
had been speculation that the announcement
could come as late as mid-December, so that the announcement wouldn’t
scuttle the chances of a spending bill necessary to fund the government
passing in the next couple of weeks. After voicing support for waiting
until the budget is taken care of, Senate Majority
Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada said Monday in an interview with Univision,
“I think it should be done now.”
Awaiting
the president’s announcement, Democrats and Republicans have pushed the
president on the issue. Top Senate Democrats expressed their support
for Obama’s impending actions in a letter
Monday. "We strongly support your plan to improve as much of the
immigration system as you can within your legal authority and will stand
behind you to support changes to keep families together while
continuing to enforce our immigration laws in a way that
protects our national security and public safety,” read the letter,
signed by Reid and fellow members of his leadership team. House
Democrats sent a similar letter last week.
Top Republicans, on the other hand, are gearing up to fight the president’s orders, though they haven’t decided exactly how.
"We're
going to fight the president tooth and nail if he continues down this
path. This is the wrong way to govern," House Speaker John Boehner,
R-Ohio, said at a press conference last week.
"All of the options are on the table." That includes using a spending
bill to restrict Obama’s executive authority on immigration and even a
government shutdown if Congress fails to fund the government in the wake
of Obama’s actions. Across the Capitol, however,
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, has ruled out
shutting down the government.
Even
Republican supporters of comprehensive immigration reform have come out
against Obama’s impending actions. "If the president were serious about
immigration reform, he'd say, 'It's a new
Congress, new members, in both House and Senate, and I'll give them a
chance to move forward on immigration reform.' He's not going to do
that," Senator John McCain of Arizona, who helped write the
comprehensive bill passed by the Senate last year, told the
Huffington Post.
Politically,
it’s clear that the president needs to act in order to shore up support
among the Latino community and the activists who have spent years
pushing for immigration reform. It’s
a community that is increasingly crucial to the Democratic
coalition—but also increasingly frustrated with the Obama
administration.
“I
think it would be accurate to say that relationships have become a bit
strained” between advocates and the White House, Frank Sharry, the
executive director of the pro-reform group America’s
Voice, told Newsweek. “It’s been a tough six years.”
It’s
a relationship that has had peaks and valleys—but mostly valleys.
Pro-immigrant advocates were thrilled when the administration sued
Arizona over its infamous anti-immigrant law SB 1070
and again when Obama announced a program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) to give young immigrants relief from
deportation. But the past year has been full of disappointment.
In
early 2014 it became clear to the advocate community that House
Republicans were not going to pass immigration reform, even though
Boehner voiced support for it. “At that point things got
a bit scratchy, where increasingly advocates were upset that [Obama]
wasn’t using executive authority to take action to protect people,”
Sharry explained. Meanwhile, Obama kept deportation numbers high,
earning him the title “deporter-in-chief” from one prominent
advocate. In June, Obama finally agreed to take action by the end of
the summer, then backtracked in September saying he would delay action
until after the midterm elections.
“The
relationship went from bad to worse. It was a pretty strong reaction
and it was genuine. There was just such deep disappointment and anger
and people were demoralized,” Sharry said.
But
Sharry also believes that if Obama finally uses his authority to make
big changes to the immigration system and help millions of undocumented
immigrants, that advocates will quickly rally
to his side. “I think the dynamic will shift pretty dramatically,” he
said.
After so much disappointment, how far is far enough?
Advocates
like Sharry have been pushing for the administration to use the
comprehensive immigration bill passed by the Senate in June 2013 as a
template for executive action that would give
an estimated 8 million people legal status. But Sharry admits that
won’t happen.
Instead,
the estimates leaked to the press are closer to 3 million to 5 million
people who could get relief. “If he protects 5 million people, that’s
going to be pretty significant,” Sharry
said. “It’s going to be a giant step forward if half the undocumented
population is protected.”
But
if Obama’s action comes in at the low end of estimates at say 2 million
people qualifying for protection, advocates will be disappointed.
How would Obama protect these people from deportation?
The
broader theme of Obama’s plan is likely to be family unity. One option
for making that happen would be to give deportation deferrals and work
permits to parents who have lived in the United
States for five years and whose children are U.S. citizens or green card holders. According to The New York Times, this could impact 3.3
million people.
The
administration is also considering expanding DACA, the 2012 program
that has thus far granted reprieve to about 600,000 “Dreamers,”
undocumented young people brought to the U.S. as children.
By tweaking age and educational requirements, for example, the White
House could expand the program to an additional 700,000 people, the
Times reported.
One
of the big unknowns—and one important to the advocate community—is
whether the parents of young people who qualify for DACA will also get a
reprieve or work permit.
“The
parents of Dreamers, the parents of young people who have DACA, the
rumor mill is that they’re not going to be included in the package, and
that’s disappointing,” Sharry said. “That’s
a group that we think is very worthy and should be included.”
Reid told Univision that he hopes the president goes “as big as he can” including the parents of Dreamers.
Advocates
are expecting changes to a controversial program called Secure
Communities, which allows federal immigration officials to pick up
undocumented immigrants in local jails and put them
on the path to deportation. The activist community wants this program
eliminated and there are rumors that Obama’s executive action could at
least retool the program so that it only focuses on serious criminals.
Activists are also looking forward to new rules
on how to carry out immigration policy through Obama’s use of
prosecutorial discretion, and they expect some changes to how visas are
tallied, or unused visas allowed to rollover year to year, so that
potentially hundreds of thousands more high-skilled immigrants
can come to the United States to work.
One
group likely to be left out of the administration’s actions are
agriculture and food processing workers—a critical part of an industry
that relies on undocumented labor. Advocates believe
as many as 70 percent of the country’s agriculture laborers are without
legal status, subject to deportation and labor abuses.
Under
the Senate bill, up to one million undocumented agriculture workers
would have qualified for legal status. But this group of immigrants
doesn’t fit as neatly into the administration’s
expected focus on family unity—farm workers are generally newer
arrivals to the United States and often don’t bring their families with
them when they come. If the administration is looking to impact people
who could ultimately be sponsored to stay in the
country through relatives, it’s a harder case to make for agriculture
workers.
But
advocates are still pushing hard to have farm workers included in
whatever steps Obama takes. On Wednesday, the United Farm Workers union
and other advocacy groups organized a Thanksgiving
meal outside the White House gates. Immigrant laborers from around the
country will bring the food that they create at home—a turkey from a
processing plant in North Carolina, potatoes from Idaho, celery from
California, and wine from Washington state—in an
effort to remind the administration and the country where their food
comes from and that they deserve relief too.
“It’s
really designed to show Americans where their food comes from and all
the work it took to prepare that meal,” an advocate for farm workers
familiar with the event told Newsweek.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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